


Inhuman

by whynottiefling



Category: Original Work
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Apocalypse, Dystopia, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Gen, Near Death Experiences, Science Fiction, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-19
Updated: 2021-01-19
Packaged: 2021-03-18 01:40:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,386
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28859004
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whynottiefling/pseuds/whynottiefling
Summary: Two students, once rivals, transverse the city in search of a child and learn what it means to be human at the end of the world.
Kudos: 1





	Inhuman

This is the house that had been left behind.

A time capsule wherein dust settled. With books where she’d left them in her father’s study; with ashen embers in the fireplace nesting cobwebs; with the same crooked chair by the dining table closest to the window. Pots and pans in their modest, canyoning disarray and the same faint scent of jasmine, patchouli, honey, and woodsmoke. All just as she remembered.

Here, the world expands and grows as though it saps from the spine of the foundation of this house, pickled and preserved in picture-perfect clarity from her childhood, and she shrinks into something softer and more volatile.

But even being here, with Lev, what’s meant to feel like home does not feel like settling. Its monosyllabic roll off the tip of a sharp tongue feels like the prick of a needle just past the threshold where it breaks skin. Settling sounds like hard consonants that tickle the eardrum and tastes metallic, coating Beth’s throat in an entirely foreign, viscous layer every time, even after all these years.

In the depths of the heart of Bethany Aldbrook, there is a forgotten winding corridor that she dares not think about where moss overgrows lush and dark; down the corridor, a deadlocked oaken door; past the door, an empty room illuminated by a sliver of moonlight; within the empty room, a deep maroon chest that collects dust; within the chest, a golden locket that looks like a pocket watch that tarnishes around the edges and is stained with blood; within the locket, a vast and unending ocean of sorrow, uncharted and long-abandoned by atlas.

Here, in her childhood home, where uncategorized and irresolute listlessness and old shrapnel of closures never had and wounds never healed rest frozen in amber, merciless waves rush through and sweep her off her feet.

And here, in this space, into Lev and only with him, does she collapse: the wet of her cheek pressed harsh and flush into his collar and trembling hands held fast against his chest in noiseless sobs, as though the weight of an ocean rushing out from the depths of her heart lodges itself in the delicate dip of her throat and asphyxiates. He does not say anything; he does not need to. He holds her with the crown of her head tucked beneath his chin, with a firm palm pressed to the valley between her shoulder blades. Her grief is quiet.

It is here, in this ocean, in the undercurrents of an unlocked ancient sentimentality, contained in a house that creaks like a ship under the weight of the ocean it contains within it, surrounded by where the woods are lovely, dark, and deep; where the hearth breathes in and out gently with the soft creaks of floorboards against the whistling of the wind; where they simply begin again, together, alone. They relearn the sting of certain helplessness. Sometimes, there’s nothing to be done to be able to fix another’s sorrow or to absorb another’s pain. That you could love someone with everything you have in your heart and still find you want to love more. That even love has painfully finite limits, like everything else.

Here, they learn there are no escapes, not really, no place without its burdens — only that burdens simply follow in different shapes and sizes and apparitions. Scars only fade but never disappear, not completely. They commit to memory that, in this way, their love is not dissimilar from a scar.

When she says to him, “There’s so much I don’t know,”, she is and is not speaking of the way the house moans under the brisk wind at night. She is and is not thinking of how it reminds her of her father, telling her that the wind at night was the howling of the spirits of wolves, protecting her from the cold, and so she should not be afraid. She is and is not speaking of the way they have found shelter, found safety, found home in one another; how they have firmly set roots in the cavity of each other’s chests, and how unlikely that was. How slow, all of a sudden. How sweet.

It is meant to say, I’m afraid of what comes next; I want to hold in my arms something so certain that it’s irrefutable; I want to find a way to survive this; I want to be made of joy with you but the world has made us hard around the edges and difficult to love and left us so scarred that I’m afraid joy is incompatible with us; I’m afraid because I keep taping up the pieces of myself that aren’t meant to work and I’m afraid of what happens when that stops being a solution.

The meaning, the intent, Lev knows intimately; knows to seal it with his thumb traced along the back of her hands and the fingers of his offhand laced through the waves of her hair like they have charted its crests and troughs delicately. And when his hand cups her cheek, the deep blue of his gaze burns within her a brilliant supernova; a simultaneous birth and death of a star in her gut in Seurat-like impressions.

Home, then, feels like the firm weight of him pressed against her: his hands, bruised and callused and harsh, pinning hers down with fingers gently entwined. Home feels like the unapologetic forest fire trail of his lips tracing her cheek, her jaw, smoke cutting her breath short of her argument, and his breath and his gaze and his body is flushed hot against her. Home sounds like the metronomic simpatico of their breathing, in the quiet, in the dark. Home tastes like bourbon and cigarettes and so distinctly like him and she can hardly stand how her back arching against him and the sound of his name softly spilled like a pearl necklace snapped at the strings and a prayer and a plea against his ear still do not feel close enough to him.

_There’s so much I don’t know_ , she thinks again, so instead, with tongues and with teeth and with rough hands and with limbs entwined, she pours what she knows of him — what she can hold in her arms and taste on his skin and smell in his hair and hear in her echoed name and see in the sea of his half-focused gaze — into the bloodstained locket, in a maroon chest, in an empty room illuminated by a sliver of moonlight, past a deadlocked oaken door, in the moss-covered and abandoned hallway in her heart.

But then she wakes up.

And the house, as remembered, isn’t real.

There are no forgotten books where she’d left them. Her father’s birch desk, nowhere to be found. No ashen embers in the fireplace nesting cobwebs. No crooked chair by the dining table closest to the window. No pots and pans in disarray. It does not smell of jasmine, patchouli, honey, and woodsmoke.

And her memories, as remembered, are misplaced.

Lev has never been in this house. He will never know how when the wind rattles the house at night, she thinks of him looking out for her. Protecting her. In spite of everything.

The structure of the house expands and contracts in the same way, but it does not feel like home. The ceiling extends higher than Beth remembers and there is nothing there to tether the tremble in her hand nor the aching threat of an ocean outpour from her heart.

This feels more like settling: the familiar acceptance of solitude and the quiet impulse of longing. What she remembers of him, visceral and near — hearing the gruff of his voice gently call her name when her hands wander too close to the golden sunlight pooling in through the crack in the window — feels like a haunting and mourning in equal measures.

Here, at the end of all things, alone she remains. In a house that no longer feels like home, because the shelter she’d made was a home she could not have; she had chosen to let love leave a scar, because she’d not known any other way to love him. Because scars are meant to fade, but never disappear completely, and memories are meant to decay in a rosy-colored sheen.


End file.
